Some people have conformed to webmail to the point that they don’t recognize the potential behind an email client. This is especially true at my place of employment, but that is an issue for a different article. An example of some email clients are MS Outlook, Thunderbird, and Evolution. The advantage of an email client really shines when you have multiple email accounts. With an email client you will be able to have all of your messages downloaded to your computer from all of your email accounts. This eliminates that need to log into different websites to check messages.

Email clients could also serve the purpose of being a company bulletin board. What do I mean by this? Assuming all of your employees have a computer at their desk and that you have setup a local email server, managers/bosses can send mass messages over the local network about new projects, deadlines, meetings, etc. This is a great way to keep people on track and open the lines of communication with the employees and management teams. As a side note, there will be less excuses like “I didn’t get the email.”

What else can an email client do? It can be the greatest organization system that you have. You can actually go beyond organization if you are really nit picky. The standard sections that you see when you access your email are inbox, sent, drafts, trash, and spam. That’s great, but it doesn’t really organize anything. With an email client, you can setup folders for each type of message. If you are a real organization freak, you can create folders within a folder. For example, my inbox contains the following folders: school, work, friends, and family. Within the school folder are the following folders: a folder for each current class, a folder for messages from faculty, and a folder for messages from classmates. Most email clients are bundled with an address book / contact manager. Using the bundled contact manager keeps all contacts in one spot instead in multiple email accounts. Since the contact manager is bundled with your email client, most likely, you can type in someone’s name instead of their email address, which makes life so much easier.

I have rambled on and on about how great an email client is. What about webmail? Webmail is the best thing to use if your email account doesn’t support email clients. At this point you have no choice. Yahoo is a great place to get a free email account, but if you want to use an email client, you would have to purchase Yahoo’s monthly service. Or there maybe times when a public firewall doesn’t allow you to use your email client. At that point, webmail is your only choice.

What do I prefer? Obviously from what I’ve been saying, email clients are the way to go. Which email client should you use? That is entirely up to you. Since I’m a Linux user, I have a choice between Thunderbird and Evolution (there are more email clients for Linux, but that is for another article). After using both email clients, I have decided that Evolution is my choice. If you are using Windows, I would recommend Thunderbird most of the time. When I did use Windows, I always preferred Thunderbird over MS Outlook. There is an exception to this. If you own a smart phone like the Blackberry or the Treos, then MS Outlook is the best email client to use. These smart phone companies have done a great job of reinforcing the notion that if something already came with something, then people will use it. Since most PC will most likely already have MS Outlook, then they will make their smart phones compatible with MS Outlook.

Planning ahead. What is your site for? Personal? Business/Professional? Multi-User? Which ever route you choose, here are some tips to help you make a decision.

Personal Use

It’s safe to assume that my own website is for personal use. Shared hosting is probably the most economical choice. Sure, a dedicated server is great, but for a personal site, it’s overkill. Shared hosting is what is offered by most hosting companies and could range from $6.00 to $20.00 per month. Since I’m pretty stingy with my money, I would go for the $6.00 per month plans. Be careful with shared hosting. It may seem like you are better off than the dedicated server, but if you intend to grow your site, shared hosting is only good for the short term. How this works is that there is this data warehouse that holds everyone’s account information. When someone logs onto your site, they are viewing content from that data warehouse. This implies that this large hard drive and bandwidth is always working to its full capacity. This full capacity is not just for your site. It’s accommodating the other domains as well. This sentence may sound a little late, but to make a long story short, laggy site. For personal sites, you won’t even notice the lag.

Business/Professional and Multi-User

Business/Professional use falls on the border line of shared hosting and a dedicated server. If your business site is only meant for showing your potential customers what services you have to offer, then shared hosting is doable. However, if you intend of offer online services such as live chat or entertainment, then dedicated server is the way to go. Here is what you get with a dedicated server. You get a dedicated server. What this means is that you get a monster of a computer to host your website. How does this help you? All of the resources are for your site only. Your bandwidth, hard drive, memory, etc., is only for your website. There is no accommodating for the domain next to you. Your website and database are in the same location. With shared hosting, most likely, your website is in one place, while your database is somewhere else. When a shared hosting company does this, it puts less stress on their resources, but you are left with a site that is a little laggy.

If you are building a multi-user website such as a facebook, eharmony, or ebay, the only decision to make is a dedicated server. Dedicated servers are not cheap, but it is the best decision to make in this situation. The initial setup of a dedicated server is more difficult than a shared host because you are really setting up a computer. With shared hosting, the computer is already set for you. Although resources are limited in the beginning, your provider can expand your server as you need.

Dennis, what do you do to host your websites?

Even though my websites are for personal use, I decided to go with a dedicated server. When I say dedicated, I really mean dedicated. Usually, when you get a dedicated server, your service provider is the one that actually holds the server. My dedicated server is right next to my bed. If anything goes wrong, the repairs are instant. Sounds cool, but it’s not the way to go for the average user. The main reason why I made the decision to host my websites from my own room is because of my hobby (Yes, obviously I need to find a new hobby, a woman, or prostitute).

If my website was on a shared hosting site, it may end up being slow because of Mai Tube and my live chat option. By the end of the year, I will have so much content that I would need a dedicated server anyway. I’m also hosting my website with limited resources. I’ve received questions about the speed of my server and size of the hard drive or drives. These people are shocked at the answer I give them. When you buy a dedicated server, the computer usually is a monster with about 2.5GHz dual core processor with 250Gb of hard drive space and 2Gb of memory. I wish I had that for my server. My home server is a 1.8GHz single core celeron processor with a 40Gb hard drive and 1Gb of memory. Pay close attention to “celeron.” A celeron processor is mainly used for everyday office duties. In the world of techies, my server is a joke. However, because my computer is dedicated to my website, my website is fast. I’m already paying for Comcast High Speed Internet, so I might as well take advantage of what I have.

Where do I stand? I use both. IMAP settings are used on my netbook and POP settings are used on my desktop. Why have two different email settings? I’ll explain in the next few paragraphs.

IMAP settings are great because it allows you to have the same information everywhere. I can add folders to my email account on one computer, and it will show up on my other computer. The same thing goes for the messages. If I read or deleted a message on one computer, I will see the same results on the other computer. Is there anything that I don’t like about IMAP settings. Actually… Yes. What I dislike about IMAP settings is that I can only view unread messages if I have an active internet connection. It’s not that big of a deal since my email is so much more organized when I switch between my two computers (soon to be three computers).

POP is what I started off with. With POP settings, all messages are actually downloaded to your computer. I liked the convenience of having every email available to me. All I needed was an internet connection for about a minute. In that minutes, all messages are downloaded to my computer and I can view them at a later time even if I haven’t read them. I still continue to use POP settings, but only on my desktop computer. About a year ago, MSN screwed me over. for some unknown reason, there was an error on their server which caused everyone to lose all of their messages. Luckily, all of my messages were synced to my computer.

Both settings have their pros and cons. To me, the greatest difference is hard disk space. IMAP doesn’t download every single thing like POP settings.

Basically what I’m doing is keeping everything lite on my netbook and using my desktop to save and backup everything. Even though my desktop holds all of my emails, I keep all of my contacts on my netbook since I use it for travel and work.

If everyone remembers, I mentioned that I saved myself from making the mistake of purchasing a netbook. I am writing this post to show everyone that I have just ate my own words.

The Acer Aspire One… It’s absolutely stunning. Well, it’s only stunning because within 15 minutes of openning the box, I had a flash drive prepared to wipe out Windows XP in exchange for Ubuntu Netbook Remix. The Acer Aspire One combined with Ubuntu Netbook Remix is like a perfect match. Everything just looks right. Enough raving about Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I’m here to talk about how cool the Acer Aspire One is.

Even though the screen is small, it’s very usable. I maintain my own website and I had no problems sending files via FTP, no problems accessing PHPMyAdmin, and no problems playing with HTML files, CSS files, and Wordpress.  It’s actually not a strain to use a netbook on a daily basis. Lucky for me, I have hands that are small enough to experience no discomfort using the keyboard.

The screen is ultra sharp and bright. Maybe a little too bright. It’s great for watching movies, up until the battery runs out. Most of the time I’m at school, so if I do run out of batteries, I’m always within a few feet of an outlet. The microphone and camera work nicely. I was able to record a video and engage in some live webcam chatting. The speakers are a little bit on the quiet side, but that’s not a big deal. When I’m using this in public, no one wants to hear what I’m working on. Headphones solve everything in that department. Even with my laptop, I always had headphones on when in public.

As great of a netbook that the Acer Aspire One is, it does have its share of problems. It did not come with an actual restore disc for Windows XP. Even though I know I would never use it, it’s nice to have if I ever wanted to sell the netbook. FYI, I really wiped out Windows XP from the system. I dedicated the entire hard drive to Ubuntu Netbook Remix. As seen in other reviews of the Acer Aspire One, the mouse does feel a little cramped. Here is where Ubuntu Netbook Remix really shines. If you look at the screenshot of my netbook, there are sidebars. This makes everything a whole lot easier to get to. Another problem with the Acer Aspire One is the battery life. I can get about 2 hours on a single charge, which is normal, but I want something that lasts a little longer. I guess I’ll be saving up for the 6-cell or 9-cell battery.

Please remember something when purchasing a netbook. It’s not really meant to replace a laptop. I’m using it as a replacement for my laptop because I have a great desktop at home. Some of the other reviews that I have read online are not really fair. People are comparing netbooks to a laptop. I hear way too many complaints about a netbook running slower than a laptop with similar specs. The capabilities of a processor from a laptop and netbook are completely different. You probably won’t be able to multi-task to the extent that you would on a laptop. Is the netbook meant for only surfing the net and checking email? NO!!! I was able to multi-task with music running in the background, Evolution opened, editing two documents, and one presentation. There is not enough screen space for me to multi-task with a movie running in the background, but movies get a little distracting.

I hope my little review helps. And remember, a netbook is not a laptop. If you need a portable workhorse, you will be better off with a laptop.

My gateway drug for Linux was Fedora. I really liked Fedora, but after discovering that there were so many other distributions of Linux, I started experimenting. Next on the list was Damn Small Linux (DSL). DSL is great for what it is, but I decided to stick with Fedora for a little while longer. Then along came PCLinuxOS. PCLinuxOS was good for a while, but for some reason, I didn’t love it as much as I thought I would. I think it was because it reminded me too much of Windows. What made me move away from Fedora was Ubuntu.

I’m not sure why I decided to stick with Ubuntu. I think it just felt right when I was using it. Plus, it was more compatible with my laptop and desktop. I use Ubuntu for everything. Initially, I only used it for my laptop and desktop. Now, I installed Ubuntu on my Acer Aspire One. The Netbook Remix version of Ubuntu is great. The Acer Aspire One originally came with Windows XP. Within 15 minutes of opening the box, I already had a flash drive ready to wipe out Windows from my netbook.

The real star of the show is this website that you are looking at. My website is hosted from my bedroom using Ubuntu. I have all of the necessary applications installed on my desktop, such as Apache, PHP, MySQL, GD Image Library, and ImageMagick. The only times that my website is ever down is when there is a power outage, my internet connection is down, or when someone accidentally turns off my computer.

When I was using Windows, I always had the problem of getting software. There is free software that is available for Windows, but most of the time, the free software is so bad that I end up saving up for software. This is one of the reasons why I decided to use linux.

Another reason is finding a challenge. Everyone says that you must be hardcore if you use linux. I wanted that title, so I began my venture. At the time, I didn’t realize that I have found a goldmine. I had no problems when installing linux on desktops, but I did have problems with laptops, specifically the wireless network card. I eventually got my old Latitude 131L laptop in perfect running condition. I see the problems and challenges a great opportunity for me to learn something.

The most important reason why I switched to linux is because of pirated software. In the past, I wasn’t really aware that downloading full versions of software from the internet was illegal. When I entered high school, I started wising up to all of those people that told me that they can give me software at no charge.

It wasn’t a big sacrifice to switch from Windows to Linux. I have a great office suite called OpenOffice, which replaces Microsoft Office. I use Evolution Mail and Calendar to replace Microsoft Outlook. I used to use Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin, but for some reason, I think Evolution works more seamlessly than Thunderbird. Sure Evolution does not sync RSS feeds, but I’m not complaining about that. I use GIMP to replace Adobe Photoshop.

All in all, I have everything I need with Linux and I have the peace of mind that I am not contributing to pirated software. Eventhough I’m using Ubuntu, I’ll always have a soft spot for Fedora. As with some things, you’ll always remember your first.

I’m not hear to write a nasty review about Microsoft Office. I will be comparing an office suite called OpenOffice to Microsoft Office.

Although OpenOffice has its share of cons, it is the best office suite I have ever used. OpenOffice has almost all of the bells and whistles that Microsoft Office has. You have the Writer (equivalent of Word), Impress (equivalent of PowerPoint), and Calc (equivalent of Excel). There is more to the OpenOffice suite, such as an equivalent of Microsoft Access, but I will not mention those since the average user only uses Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

Since I am a college student, every dollar counts. OpenOffice is distributed for free. I can install it on all of my computers without worrying about a multi-user license. This software is also free if you decide to use it for commercial use. When I said “free,” I’m not talking about a trial. OpenOffice is an open source office suite. The cost of Microsoft Office adds up. If you read the user license, you can only install Microsoft office on one computer. I have heard that the “Home and Student” version of Microsoft Office is the cheapest version and can be installed on up to three computers. That version would not have all of the features like the ones in the full version of Microsoft Office. The price per computer could be somewhere between $200-$300 depending on the version you purchase.

Like almost all office suites, OpenOffice saves files in it’s own format, but you also have the option of saving files as a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document, making it compatible with your friends and collegues that use Microsoft Office. A feature that I don’t see included with Microsoft Office is the option of saving files as a PDF. With Microsoft Office, you can always install an external program such as PrimoPDF (free) or get the professional version of Adobe Acrobat (must pay) to save files as PDFs. With OpenOffice, there is a button that you can click on that says “Export to PDF.”

So far, I have done nothing but praise OpenOffice. Now I get to comment on its short comings. OpenOffice has a great spellchecker, but it doesn’t come with a grammar checker. You can add on a grammar checker using a plugin, but it’s still not as good as the grammar check you would use with Microsoft Office. The upside of all of this is that you are forced to proofread your work. There is a reason why you have that thing that is attached to your neck. Feel free to use it once in a while.

Although it is compatible with Microsoft Office, some files may not “look” right. I have not come across any problems with viewing a Word document or Excel file with OpenOffice. There are some issues with PowerPoint presentations. I don’t see problems with all powerpoint presentations, but on some the format of the text is off.

Obviously, my choice between the two office suites is OpenOffice. The cost of Microsoft Office is a little much for me. The only reason why I would use Microsoft Office is if I have other software that relies on it. Lucky for me, I don’t. Let me clear some things up before I end this write up. I wrote this comparison from a legal perspective. Some people will probably argue that they only paid for Microsoft Office once and installed it on their own computer and for their friends’ and families. When you do that, you are clearly violating the license agreement. Here is a tip for anyone that is buying a computer from someone or from eBay. If the original software disc is not included with the computer/laptop, in most cases, the software is illegal. Some people would probably call my comparison unfair because you can download a full version of Microsoft Office from the internet. If you feel like contributing to pirated software, feel free to download the full version from the internet. I also urge you to look up the fine for using a pirated copy of Microsoft Office or violating the license agreement.

Here is the single feature that really sets OpenOffice apart from Microsoft Office. Similar to Wordpress, you can easily extend OpenOffice with the use of plugins. If you see a plugin you like, download it and use the extension manager to install it. You pay money for Microsoft Office 2007, yet it does not come with a “solver.” You don’t pay for OpenOffice and you can add on the “solver” without paying. For all that don’t know, the “solver” is a feature in older version of Microsoft Office that does all of the calculations for you when you are dealing with optimization problems, quantitative business analysis problems, and materials resource planning problems.

Here is my project for the summer. There are applications that rely on Microsoft Office, such as Dentrix and Easy Dental. It is my mission to find a way to modify these programs to work with OpenOffice. These applications are setup to look for Microsoft Office as the program to use for editing documents. I want to modify these programs to search for any “Office” application to be used as a document editor.

What if you could call on a relative that knew how to fix your problem without having to drive?

Reverse VNC is the answer.

With traditional VNC, you would have to preset up your router to have someone else take advantage of remote support. The same thing goes for Microsoft Remote Desktop. Here is the problem. Could you really ask the library, or any public place, permission to change some network settings so you could have someone remotely fix your computer? Would you even know how to set up the network even if you could?

Reverse VNC is exactly what the name says. Instead of the remote technician making a connection with your computer to gain remote access, your computer makes the connection to the remote technician. There is no configuring of any hardware on your end. Since you are making the connection to the technician, it’s the technician’s responsibility to properly set up his/her network.

So far, Microsoft Remote Desktop doesn’t allow such a feature (Unless you modify the program yourself. Hint…). The beauty of reverse VNC is the ability to be on any operating system. You’re not restricted to Windows. You have the option of using Linux and MacOS. You can be using a MacOS computer and your technician could be on a Linux platform, and you would still receive the support you need.

Here is a great example that happened recently. One of my boys was at Starbucks and he didn’t know how to use Excel to solve an MRP problem. He texted me for help and I told him to install my reverse VNC software. To make a long story short, I was able to talk to him over the phone and control his computer, so it was almost like I was standing next to him. Plus, I don’t really like using a computer at Starbuck. There’s too much attention. Anyway, this application goes beyond technical support. I was also tutoring and helping him understand a homework problem.

Best of all, most reverse VNC software is open source. No need to worry about licenses.

What’s the downside of this great software? You need an internet connection. If you were stranded in the desert and needed my help, call someone else.

Given the circumstances, I think I will need a smartphone. Smartphones can use VNC software, too.

Feel free to download my program by clicking here.